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I have talked about many excellent games here but they are always revisits to games that I had previously played or that had been on the market for years and I already had an impression of them, this time I would like to do something different and review a game that I have played very recently and that has quickly become one of my favorites.
The videogame industry is changing all the time, it is a young industry that is still looking for a gap between criticism and bad concepts, With so many new ways to interact with the environment I think this medium has bestial potential over other artistic mediums like cinema when it comes to presenting and dealing with perspective, after all since its inception we have played with it since the beginning and nowadays with virtual reality and stereoscopy. Superliminal plays with our sense of perspective to engage us in seemingly impossible Puzzles that need another angle to be understood and solved. The work of Albert Shih, who is today one of the authors I most follow and look forward to his games, is a fresh and challenging exercise of what a videogame can be and become.
Let's talk about the game, with the premise of being trapped in a dreamlike experiment we are put in the middle of having to solve puzzles that are kept simple but challenging going into the map and discovering objects that are hidden in contrast to the scenario to simulate that they are in a completely different way to their real state. It's a simple idea but with the game's sense of humor and the situations it puts us in, it makes for a title that is full of personality and memorable. Reality is distorted in this space and the game is aware of this to use it to wrap us in situations that border on the absurd but at the same time never feel forced or lacking in charisma.
This is the kind of game that I would associate with titles like Beginner's Guide or Stanley Parable, it is an experience that is small yes, but it brings a freshness and a groundbreaking vision of what a game is, throughout the campaign we will not need anything more than our wits to go exploring through areas very well built and find objects that may seem large or small or be placed in such a way that the scenario that deceive us, A chess piece can be placed in such a way that when we enter the room it looks small but a little perspective is enough to realize that it is the size of the room and we can use it as a bridge or staircase to go to the next area. These are small details that make me wonder how is it that we had not seen a game with this idea in today's video game industry, although to be honest I am very happy that the Indie scene is so developed as to make this kind of proposals that I love.
The plot works much more as a supplementary feature than as something focused and elaborated, we are trapped in a software based on sleep therapy in which nothing is what it seems and we must navigate through a series of areas to find the way to escape, simple and to the point, we have several details like the radiocassettes that help us to make sense of the story but I have seemed more like souvenirs of the game than as a story because each recording can be cryptic and even meaningless, We can say that the story works to complement the experience, I would have liked to delve much more into this world and the personal conflict that makes our protagonist induced in this therapy but seeing the full game I understand that the developers wanted to focus much more on the main thing of the game: The Puzzles and the feel of the game.
The puzzles are the strong point of the game for me and where it stands out the most, although it is true that its duration and the amount of puzzles presented to us will cause that after a certain time we lose the surprise effect, in the early stages Superliminal did not fail to surprise me by their approaches that played with perception, for example in an area of the game I was asked to find an item in a room full of objects without knowing that the answer is (literally) attached to a wall in which we must see it with a certain perspective. The way in which this game treats spatial vision with ways of presenting the answers that are both simple and surprising comes very well with the humorous approach it has in some areas in which it tends to deceive us by putting the obvious answer in the middle of the room. Nothing is what it seems and although in the second section the game loses pace it is still entertaining to play.
The setting is GREAT in this game, it traps us in a unique environment in the same way as other experimental titles like Stanley Parable and makes us want to discover and go beyond each area we enter (something that the game unfortunately does not deepen) designs, although simple, are successful and allow us to explore the environment with more agility. The music also pleased me enough accompanying each level in a relaxed way, almost as if we were in a real dreamlike experiment the soundtrack of this game is based mostly on classic themes accompanied by soft tunes, an extra that somehow strangely made me want to continue in the game even in the levels where I was stuck for hours.
Superliminal is an ingenious, creative and fresh proposal that presents the perspective in a surprising and unique way, a broad and full of charisma experiment that I ended up loving from the first minutes to its credits, in this blog I talk a lot about the influence that Valve has had in many games throughout history and this one precisely I think evokes much of that essence that I commented back then, it is a short experiment, yes, but pleasantly surprising coming from the Indie world and makes its place as one of my favorite titles that I have been able to play in this 2021. I recommend it and I would revisit it again.
Thank you very much for stopping by my post, this game really awakened my desire to make an analysis as soon as possible so it is likely that over time I will mold a more complete opinion, for now it is one of my favorite titles and one that I recommend even in the same way that I recommended Portal in the previous review. If you liked it please leave me a comment highlighting something that caught your attention in the post and follow me for more content on Hive!
Edit: Thanks for the support!!